Elizabeth Parrish Balazs, 2026

University of Oxford, Master of Literature and Arts

The Victorian period's rapid expansion of mass media and print culture fundamentally transformed how literature was produced, circulated, and interpreted. With the advent of woodcut illustration and serialised publication, images became active participants in narrative meaning-making rather than decorative supplements — co-constitutive forces shaping readerly engagement before, alongside, and beyond the letterpress. This dissertation argues that the illustrated serial cultivated habits of suspicion, inference, and evidentiary reading in Victorian readers, and that these habits were systematised and codified by the emergence of detective fiction as a genre. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, particularly the logic of abductive reasoning and the triadic sign, alongside the montage logic of the Victorian periodical page, the analysis traces this development across a corpus spanning Dickens, Collins, Braddon, and Doyle, examining how proleptic illustrations trained readers to hypothesise across the gaps between what was shown and what the narrative authorised. A sustained close reading of Lady Audley's Secret (1863) demonstrates how the productive dissonance between image and text in the illustrated serial produced a forensic reading subject: a reader practised in suspicion, inference, and the marshalling of visual evidence. This dissertation proposes that sensation fiction functioned as a laboratory of interpretive training long before detective fiction appeared as a codified genre, and that the Strand Magazine Holmes stories represent not a rupture but a culmination; the point at which a mode of reading becomes a genre's defining logic.